From Tumblbug to 157,000 Players: The Strange Rise of Project Moon

On 9 July 2026, Project Moon's servers buckled. The studio had just launched Fixer of the Dawn, the ninth Walpurgisnacht event in its free-to-play RPG Limbus Company, and players arrived faster than the infrastructure could cope. Steam recorded 157,444 concurrent players, a new peak for the game, and with mobile added the total passed 310,000. The studio apologised for the instability and gave every player 1,300 Lunacy, its premium currency.

Not bad for a company that began a decade ago with a crowdfunding page and a group of college students. Project Moon's rise is one of the most unusual stories in Korean games: no big publisher, no MMORPG, no mobile hit formula. Just three dark, strange, text-heavy games set in the same universe, and a fandom that follows every one of them.

A horror office job, funded by fans

Project Moon was founded in November 2016 by Kim Ji-hoon, who recruited its first members from among college students. It is based in Gwanggyo, in Suwon, south of Seoul.

Its first game had already started before the company was official. Lobotomy Corporation raised money on the Korean crowdfunding site Tumblbug in 2015, entered early access in December 2016 and fully launched in April 2018. The idea is wonderfully grim: you manage a company that captures monsters called Abnormalities and extracts energy from them, sending employees to "work" with creatures that may kill them. Its inspirations included the online horror fiction project SCP Foundation and the film The Cabin in the Woods.

What made it stand out was the way it mixed spreadsheets and dread. You learn each Abnormality's likes and dislikes through trial and error, and a wrong choice can trigger a breach that spreads through the whole facility. Days repeat, mistakes are punished, and the story slowly reveals that the company, and the player, are part of something much larger. It was hard, often unfair, and hugely memorable, which is exactly the reputation that built the studio's early fanbase.

Library of Ruina and the City

The second game, Library of Ruina, entered early access on 28 May 2020 and fully launched in August 2021 on Windows and Xbox One. It continues Lobotomy Corporation's story in a sprawling, violent setting known simply as "the City", and replaces the management sim with a deck-building card battler. Instead of capturing monsters, you invite guests into a library and turn the defeated into books.

Its music came from Mili, a band whose songs became a big part of the series' identity. Fans often point to Library of Ruina as the moment Project Moon's world-building clicked: each game stands alone, but together they form one continuous, deeply strange universe.

Limbus Company goes free-to-play

The third game took a different business model. Limbus Company launched in late February 2023 as a free-to-play turn-based RPG for Windows, iOS and Android, funded by in-app purchases. You play as a manager leading twelve Sinners into the buried facilities of Lobotomy Corporation in search of the Golden Boughs.

It is a gacha game (players spend currency on random draws to unlock characters), which is common in mobile games but new for Project Moon. Long story chapters, called Cantos, and limited-time events keep players coming back. Combat is turn-based but busy: you match skill "coins" against enemy attacks in clashes, so planning which Sinner faces which foe matters more than raw stats. On Steam the game holds a Very Positive rating, with 92% of more than 52,000 English reviews recommending it.

Walpurgisnacht and the record chart

The Walpurgisnacht events are Limbus Company's biggest moments. They bring in characters from Lobotomy Corporation and Library of Ruina as limited-time Identities and E.G.O (alternative character versions and special attacks). The player peaks show a clear upward trend:

• The sixth event, in July 2025, peaked at about 110,000 Steam players and reached No. 2 in sales in Korea and Japan.
• The eighth, in March 2026, peaked at about 120,000.
• Steam set another high of about 131,000 in late May 2026.
• The ninth, Fixer of the Dawn, hit 157,444 on Steam in July 2026, with more than 310,000 across PC and mobile.

Project Moon has also grown well beyond games. Since March 2020 it has published WonderLab, a webcomic set in the Lobotomy Corporation world. It runs a themed café, HamHamPangPang, which shares its name with a restaurant from the games. It has exhibited at Tokyo Game Show every year since 2022, and in 2021 it received an investment of about ₩2 billion from Devsisters Ventures, the investment arm of the Cookie Run maker.

The controversy it still lives with

Project Moon's story also includes one of the most debated incidents in recent Korean game history. On 25 July 2023, some players began demanding that an illustrator be removed over social media posts from 2017 that they called misandric. The game was review-bombed, and about ten people visited the company's headquarters. Early on 26 July, the studio announced it would remove the artist and stop using her work.

The company described the departure as a mutually agreed end of contract. News outlets and labour activists called it a dismissal, and critics described the case as a labour rights violation and a sign of anti-feminist pressure in the Korean games industry. In November 2023, Project Moon filed defamation complaints against labour activists; police dismissed the case in July 2024. Project Moon has said its decision was about its policy on employees' social media accounts, not player complaints. The episode is still part of how many people see the studio, and any honest account of its success has to include it.

By the numbers

• 2015: Lobotomy Corporation's crowdfunding campaign on Tumblbug.
• November 2016: Project Moon founded.
• 3: games in one shared universe.
• 12: Sinners in Limbus Company.
• 157,444: Limbus Company's Steam concurrent peak (July 2026).
• 310,000+: total concurrent players across PC and mobile that day.
• 92%: positive English Steam reviews for Limbus Company.

Why it matters

Project Moon shows that a Korean studio can build a global audience on story and world-building alone. Its games are hard, dense and unapologetically weird, and they never chased the safest genre of the moment. Each one fed the next: fans of Lobotomy Corporation bought Library of Ruina, and fans of both made Limbus Company a hit.

WGC's take: Limbus Company's records also show how far "indie" can stretch. A studio that started on Tumblbug now runs a live-service game with more players at its peak than many big-budget releases. The challenge now is the one every live game faces: keeping servers, story and community healthy at a scale the founders probably never imagined.

What to play next

• New to the City? Start with Lobotomy Corporation. It is the foundation for everything that follows, though its difficulty is famously high.
• Prefer card games? Library of Ruina works as a standalone deck-builder with a story that rewards patience.
• Want the live game? Limbus Company is free on Steam and mobile; the early Cantos introduce the Sinners without requiring the older games.